As I promised in my last post, here is a more detailed post about my t-shirt quilt. It took me nearly a year to make, but I didn’t work on it continually. I’m not a quilter at heart. I enjoy it from time to time, but mostly I can only do it in small spurts between other projects. So, I picked away at making it whenever I got the quilting bug, until I decided that it was time to finish. Winter is coming (quote intended), and I wanted a warmer blanket!

Anyway, what is it? It’s a quilt made from old things. The basis of it was my old t-shirts from high school and college (mostly band shirts), which had a lot of sentimental meaning to me, but were too old and worn-out to wear. I decided that a quilt would be a good way to hang onto them and keep them useful, so I got them together and started cutting out squares. A while back, I posted about my rug made from old t-shirts…this was the leftovers from these shirts after I’d cut out the squares. At some point, I decided that I only wanted to use recycled materials for my quilt, so I took all the clothes I had that were too old, stained, and/or torn to donate, along with a few end pieces from jeans I’ve hemmed over the years, and used those to fill the spaces. Overall, it turned out pretty random, which is what I was going for. I used an old cheapie Ikea blankets (the blue ones that cost a Euro something) as batting, because batting is expensive and I wanted to save money, and an old sheet Petz tore (bad kitty) as backing. I’m super happy with it…it’s comfy and it’s full of great memories.

If you want to make your own, you will need:
-T-shirts and other old clothes,
-Fusible interfacing (because t-shirts are stretchy and you need to back them onto something not-stretchy),
-Something to measure with,
-Something to use as batting (actual batting, an old blanket…something slightly thicker to go in between),
-An old sheet or something larger to use as backing.

It’s also really helpful if you have a rotary cutter and a quilting square. I forgot I had these when I started the project, but I remembered later on and my squares were much more accurate and faster to cut out after that!

It’s easiest if you work it in smaller blocks and then sew those together. This makes the randomness more manageable. Of course, you can also make all your blocks the same size if you prefer a more “orderly” look.

(The awful blanket I used)

I found the most difficult part was sewing the quilt onto the blanket. The blanket didn’t want to keep its shape! After that, it was quick to finish.

I expect the cat will think it’s his fairly soon!